


Oregon

by viceroyvonmutini



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-09
Updated: 2015-06-09
Packaged: 2018-04-03 03:09:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4084333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viceroyvonmutini/pseuds/viceroyvonmutini
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She was going to get to Oregon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Oregon

**Author's Note:**

> This was never meant to happen but then someone showed me that new quote about Oregon Trail turning Root into a killer for hire and this happened. Thanks Greg. 
> 
> Honestly I'm not really disputing that point: that game is hard and there's only so many times you can die of dysentery before murder becomes the only viable option.

Computers are things.

Slow. Cumbersome. Practically useless.

Computers are things. Physical things. Hard drives and plastic and monitors and heavy keys with printed letters and a plain black screen. 

 

The library is loud but Samantha can’t hear a thing. It’s the middle of the day-a Saturday- and it buzzes with life. Barbara Russell flits about her station as best she can, checking out books and making polite conversation but it’s all Samantha can do to ignore it. Ignore the sounds. Ignore the books flying from shelves into the hands of ordinary citizens. Painfully ordinary.

Samantha can’t hear a thing but the click of the keys beneath her fingers as her hands trace the words idly and they appear on the screen like they were meant to.

She’s at the back of the room; she’s at the computer but she’s not alone as the desks around her bustle with studious classmates and the scraping of pencil against paper and it seems so archaic as she types.

She types fast. She types as fast as her runaway thoughts and she’s so focused but there’s the noise at the back of her mind and it stops her from her task and her fingers still, poised upon the keyboard.

The seat beside her fills and she fixes her eyes on the screen. She fixes her eyes on the flashing cursor and wills him to disappear.

He doesn’t.

But he doesn’t acknowledge her either. This is an improvement.

Her body is tense.

She erases her presence from the screen and a single flashing white line remains.

She stands, chair tugging on old carpet as she pushes it away and walks out of the library.

 

Samantha Groves has big ideas in a small world.

Her world is small: Bishop, Texas was old and small and small and small and a cage.

Samantha Groves was capable of anything but the world wanted her to have nothing.

Samantha would take everything.

 

The library is quiet and Samantha is at home. The sun is set and she’s bathed in fluorescence that anyone else would find harsh but she works so quickly.

Her words are bridges and her fingers construct each one far quicker than the last gaining practice with each keystroke and she can feel the corner of her mouth turn up the more she builds.

She is caged but she has a key.

 

Computers are things.

Bridges. Gateways. A way out.

Computers are things. Just as much as books. Endless words and symbols in another language that she can read with such clarity. 

Computers are possibility.

 

All she needed was the key and just a moment’s access and she had the world. The first time she sat at a computer she understood nothing. There was one computer in all of Bishop and she sat before that black screen, back then the plastic was still white, and she turned the strange contraption on.

Nothing happened but a flashing white line appeared.

The computer was rarely used because no one knew how to use it. It was meant to be a marvel but instead seemed to fall in step with the dust-ridden town lost to time. It was a disappointment, much like everything else in the town.

Samantha had a lot of time and a mind restless with the need for knowledge and somehow that flashing white line made more sense than anything else in the town she hated. The black screen became something: a thousand possibilities limited only by her own growth and she understood what she needed to know.

Samantha had time and patience but it came almost naturally to her: the straightforward nature of each command was such relief to her because here was something she could understand.

All she needed was the key.

 

Computers are assets.

Aids and guides. She has always worked in symbiosis with machines and somehow they made her better.

Her reach was endless.

 

Nothing is born complete. Samantha understood this. But she would make it complete.

 

The library was always her sanctuary: her gate to a thousand worlds of words written by others where nothing needed to matter but now it was her own words that built the gate. She sat at that computer and constructed her world: a world of code and letters and numbers linked by what she could create.

She could see anything she wished so long as she could imagine it beneath her fingers, fast as lightening.

The others couldn’t see but part of her didn’t want them too.

 

The only other souls that used that computer were her peers. The library kept some disks of ‘educational programs’ meant to help the students and sometimes she would find the computer-her domain-taken by sniveling idiots pressing with cumbersome fingers as they strained to overcome simple problems.

They would leave and she would sit and word spread of ROOT: who was ROOT? How did they get the high scores? They must be brilliant.

Samantha would sit in silence, watching her peers ponder and sing praise and sometimes it would bite at her the way they disregarded her presence with as much enthusiasm as they sang her praise.

 

Computers are assets.

There was something incredible they way the machine worked with her. It completed her: she completed it.

Everything was possible.

 

There was a girl.

Her name was Hanna Frey and Samantha thought she had found the exception.

Her life had been plagued with what people thought they were, and what they were. What they wanted to be, and what they chose to be. Samantha could see both where most were blind and she had been disappointed in both. Books-and her computer-were something solid. They said what they meant and they didn’t disappoint. Not in the way humans did.

Samantha thought she had found the exception.

There was a game-Oregon Trail-and almost 3 times a week Hanna Frey would sit and play that game each time to disappointment and Samantha would watch from between the shelves over the edge of a book mentally calculating each wrong move made.

Instead of anger, instead of her dismissal of stupidity there was that patience. She would watch and she would chide softly and bite her lip when a particularly frustrating error was made but she would never step any closer.

Hanna Frey went to her school, was in her class and Samantha would watch.

Hanna spoke to her once and she was confident and smart and Samantha was stilted but she got the words out as she would any other time and somehow managed to make it sound like she meant it.

Hanna Frey was her friend.

Samantha was quiet, observant; Hanna was forward and drew attention.

Samantha was drawn to Hanna.

There was a girl.

 

_‘I don’t understand why you play those stupid games.’_

_‘Because I’m going to get to Oregon.’_

 

Computers are tools.

Precise. Accurate. To the point.

In the right hands it could be something deadly.

 

Sam was good with computers.

They were her eyes and her ears and she knew how to use them with devastating results.

That was a lesson she learnt alone.

 

Computers are tools.

Weapons. Deadly. Devastating.

Utilized to their potential there was something so elegant in their power.

 

Where others saw a crawling attempt at technology Root saw something magnificent. Root saw everything it could be and she grasped it with two hands.

Her life was series of numbers and reams of code generated as long as her hands kept moving.

Technology had taken a turn for the better and where once stood old monitors and heavy keys instead there was the small and the portable and networks that stretched across the globe.

Everything was there for the taking.

Root took it all and never looked back.

 

Computers are belief.

With advancement and evolution Root learnt that her faith had once been misguided.

Faults were human.

 

There was this strange dichotomy between what Root did and what Root created.  

She was a ghost but she had never been more alive. People knew her name, it ran like whispers across the vast web and she watched each tendril of her influence form and nurtured it from behind her screen. She was as indefinable as legend but she always got results.

And yet no one had seen her face-or if they had they didn’t know it- and she rarely left her seat. Distanced from her actions through lines of code and the tapping of fingers. Viewing through video feeds what others experienced through their senses she saw things differently. She saw what others did not through her eyes and her ears: she saw how they lied, how they fucked and how they died. She saw everything.

 

Everything has a flaw and Root was very good at finding them.

Machines were simple. People took time. But flaws are like a virus that never goes away and Root saw everything.

Root saw beyond veneers; she prodded and poked and watched cracks widen until their lives fell around them like glass.  

Root created veneers; built them up from the ground with painstaking efficiency and inhabited them almost as well as her targets did.

You had to believe what you lived.

 

Computers are belief.

Root believed in her own abilities and was secure in her talents and had enough faith in machines to guide her.

Faith in circuitry was natural.

 

It is hard to find meaning in humanity when what has served you well is a product of their limitations.

 

Of your own limitations.

Root was not so presumptions to view herself above the fundamental errors of her own code.

 

Computers are devotion.

There was nothing else in Root’s life worth such attention.

 

When an obstacle arises the solution is only as easy as you make it.

There was nothing that Root could not solve. Root was ruthless and determined and above all she was curious.

 

FBI paid me a visit. Good thing I travel light…

**Who are you?**

My name? I’ve had a few. You can call me Root.

**Did you kill Matheson?**

Matheson was a casualty of his own weakness.

**Why did you contact me?**

I wanted to acknowledge a worthy opponent. And say I’m looking forward to the next time…

…Harold.

 

There was something greater than what she thought humanity had created. Someone had succeeded where all others had failed-where she believed no one could succeed- and the possibility drove her.

Harold Finch.

 

Computers are devotion.

There was nothing Root wouldn’t do.

 

The Man Who Sold The World.

 

The Man Who Built God.

 

Computers are clarity.

Simple in the infinite machinations of the world.

 

When she can see for the first time her only regret is that is cannot be savoured. It is like sipping from the spring of youth, or eating the fruit of Hades she isn’t sure which she just knows that she cannot stop.

She can see.

She has always been alone. But there is a voice in her ear and it tells her everything. It reminds her of human frailty and human fault.

 

_‘I’m beginning to see how you developed such a dim view of humanity Harold.’_

 

She saw that long before she could see but perhaps this had given validation to what she had already known: that her and Harold were the same. That humanity had run its course.

That we are Bad Code.

 

There are many things Root would like to know and even more she would like to explore but time was not on her side. She had a mission that she would complete.

Because just like anyone else Harold was riddled with fault and she would right his wrongs-her service to him- and free something…magnificent.

 

Computers are clarity.

It was everything she could have dreamed and more.

 

Root had never sought company. She sought relief perhaps- one night stands she would never see again where names and identities didn’t factor- but company was a hindrance and tiresome and she had very little patience these days. But alone in the psych ward she was so desperately alone.

 

Computers are whispers.

Root will never be alone.

 

She has purpose.

 

Computers are whispers.

Root would follow to the end of the world.

 

Her word was everything and Root would oblige.

 

Computers are trust.

Something Root fell into wholeheartedly.

 

She was tied to a chair in a place she didn’t know confined by a mesh cage and she began to lose track of time somewhere around the 13th injection. Her body was breaking but her mind was focused.

Even those in power were so ignorant: she asked all the wrong questions in all the wrong ways and Root could only laugh.

 

_‘You view the Machine as your superior?’_

_‘No…much more. My power, my reason for existing, my friend. The Machine looks out for me.’_

 

Everything happened for a reason.

There was a reason for everything, something Root had spent so long denying but there was a plan because She was there to write it and Root was simply the player.

 

Computers are trust.

Root was always good at falling.

 

There was a girl.

Her name was Sameen Shaw and Root had found the exception.

Trust was such an easy thing for Root: to replicate, to produce and to believe. Trust was something she believed in. It had helped her so many times and it was so very easy to earn. Sameen Shaw was different. Trust was like a distant star and Root had to work for it.

Sameen Shaw did not want to give it but Root would take it anyway.

 

Computers are information.

Nothing was more important to Root than knowledge.

 

It was easy to get lost in cold facts. It was a puzzle and She liked it when Root worked it out herself and Root loved the challenge, piecing together what she had in a way so satisfying, dissecting people and flaws and motives and actions.

Sameen Shaw didn’t care for any of that. She defied it: defied definition and category and Root still couldn't place where she fell or what she would do. Unpredictability should have scared her in her world of the rational-the predictable fallible nature of humanity-but instead her mind sparked and she was enthralled. It was the ultimate challenge that she never wanted to end. 

 

Computers are information.

She had flaws.

 

Sameen Shaw should have flaws-and Sameen Shaw did have flaws and Root could see them just as clearly as she could with any other- but with Sameen Shaw it did not matter.

 

There was a girl.

 

There was a machine.

 

Sometimes there was nothing in her life more important than The Machine. The Machine was her everything and she would follow her anywhere but then there was Sameen, the variable She couldn’t account for and sometimes this worried Root. Sometimes she would wonder whether one day She would realize that Root’s focus was not so singular as to be faithful to Her and cast her aside because what good is a prophet with two Gods?

 

But mostly she cared not one bit.

 

Computers are direction.

Sameen always was focused on the mission.

 

Root had a mission to protect the Machine.

Sameen had a mission to protect.

 

Computers are direction.

Root had never been steered wrong.

 

Computers are code.

 

_‘Bob should leave Alice.’_

 

Computers taught her humans.

Sameen taught her humanity.


End file.
